AGORA2/1/2011

Customers: Lessons Learned

Potential for alternate sales model: sell to the individual engineer then up-sell to enterprise

Diversity of cloud service offerings Need to consider not just IaaS but also

PaaS Decision chain / sales model learnings Low search volume for terms related to

cloud comparison: missionary market

Information services True marketplace

Our view last week: fork in the road

Our view this week: Agora evolution

Time

Complexity

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3

Search Keywords

Lesson Learned:Very little search traffic -> a “missionary” sales effort

Highly Competitive Keywords

Lesson Learned:AdWords (paid SEM) is not going to be an efficient channel with these keywords

Costs for Informational Service Website

Development•Source Control (Github)•Agile Management (PivotalTracker)

Cost: ~$900/yr

Hosting•Application Hosting (Heroku)•Domain Reg, SSL (Godaddy)•Privacy Policy (TrustE)•CDN (MaxCDN)

Cost: ~$3700/yr

Marketing•~2000 marketing emails/day (SES)•Search Marketing (AdWords)•PR

Cost: TBD

Billing / Payment•Billing (Chargify)•Authorize.NET(Payment Gateway)

Cost: ~$1800/yr

Support•Support Forum (GetSatisfaction)

~$1200/yr

Job Processing•Cloud (AWS EC2)

Cost: TBD

Total: > $7500 / yr

Sales process: major learnings

Potential to target engineers, meet

their needs and get built into workflow. Then up-sell across

enterprise

If you meet the needs of engineer,

may be able to short-circuit this

process

Appendix

Demand Creation Budget Lead gen: $40K Inside sales reps: $600K Tradeshows: $200K Total: $840K

A First Product: Logging/Prediction

Job Started

Job Ended

Spin Up New Server?

Spin down?

Server Logging Control Panel

Who we talked to so far

Customers: Lessons LearnedHypothesis Findings

Sell-side • Public clouds •Seller: IT/ Business unit •Interest in monetizing unused capacity

Sell-side • Private clouds • One photo/video sharing site with excess capacity might be interested – scheduling interview

Buy-side • Startups • User: IT admin• Approver / Buyer: CEO • Most are satisfied with AWS• Alternative to AWS: hosted solution/ own servers

Buy-side • Enterprises • User: IT admin• Approver: IT director, VP IT, CIO• Economic buyer: CFO, CEO• Influencer: Industry analysts, cloud consultants, peers•May be additional route in, through meeting need of engineer and getting embedded in workflow

Buy-side • Rogue developers

• TBD

Value Proposition: Lessons Learned

Hypothesis Findings

Sell-side Service providers

• Additional marginal revenue at negligible cost (mostly additional customer service cost)

Sell-side Enterprises

• Lower IT cost – spot market

•May be wrong side of the house – IT departments are not responsible for rev gen*

Buy-side • Reduced infrastructure cost• Best-matched service provider

• Cost savings may be significant enough for enterprises with large modeling tasks (life sciences, energy, FS, radio technology) to consider*

* needs additional validation

Value Proposition: New Hypotheses

Hypothesis Findings

Sell-side • Demand prediction to optimize capacity planning

• Azure penalized for not meeting SLAs•Difficult for public cloud providers to determine optimal capacity planning

Buy-side • Infrastructure demand prediction to optimize cloud spend

• Example: life sciences, energy*

* needs additional validation